Skip to Content

Stanford Business magazine

 

She’s a Hottie Now

HottieSongsThe moment of truth arrived for Heidi Roizen, MBA ’83, one morning last May, when she stepped on the scale and discovered she weighed more than her husband. “That’s one of those times when you say, ‘I’ve got to do something about this,’” Roizen told lifestyle show host Martha Stewart.

Roizen had tried diet and exercise to little avail. The music she worked out to was OK, but the words were either violent or vapid. Then it hit her: “There ought to be music to psych you up, music that when you’re driving to the gym, it makes sure you actually go in.”

Roizen is known as a successful software entrepreneur and venture capitalist, but she’s also a funny writer. In the months after she hit the weight wall, she wrote lyrics to a bunch of motivational workout songs. One is an ode to the “Skinny Jeans” that hang in what her husband calls her “aspirational wardrobe.” Another, inspired by the words on her car’s rearview mirror, proclaims:

“Objects in the mirror will get thinner than they now appear.” There’s Roizen’s power app for power abs, “The Incredible Shrinking Woman”:

You see I’m a superhero, with powers of epic might / I use wills of steel, at every meal, to control my every bite / And with my X-ray vision I can see without a doubt / There’s a skinny girl inside me, I’ve just got to let her out.

Roizen recruited Nashville producer David Malloy to write music to her lyrics and singers to record them. She put up the money, and six months after hitting her personal worst, Roizen had gained a music company and lost 30 pounds.

Roizen’s songs and her line of inspirational tees and tanks (including Stewart’s favorite, “Do Not Feed”) are available through SkinnySongs.com.

As for the lyricist, she’s singing “I’m a Hottie Now” all the way to the gym.